Valerean

Since my hair has grown very thin and fine in old age I've begun using scrunchies rather than elastic bands for my ponytails. I saw these on Etsy that have a little bow that I liked. When they arrived I decided to dress them up a little more with some vintage brooches. These will be nice to wear when my guy and I go out for dinner or some special occasion. It's a nice way to wear old jewelry in a different way. :)

My one major accomplishment this summer was finishing my annual art quilt. It took six weeks and about 200 hours of stitching. I used strictly vintage, recycled or repurposed materials for the quilt, including scrap batting and threads. I was able to incorporate some broken costume jewelry, and the hand-dyed textiles are all vintage recycled fabrics as well. Two plastic fish buttons leftover from the koi quilt I made earlier this year decided to add themselves as a bit of whimsy. Although I've joked about it being a map to a treasure hoard, in reality the quilt is an abstract/dream/fantasy view of a place where my guy and I sit by the lake. It's a beautiful, peaceful spot where I am always at peace. Every element has meaning to me. For example, when I take pictures of the lake there the sunlight sometimes casts bohkeh reflections in violet on my pics. These crystal montees represent that light. There's always a spider and web in my art qu...

One day after my dermatology visit I woke up looking like this fellow's twin sister. I'm a bit redder in the face, and not as cheerful. I could barely open my eyes. Forgive me for not posting a real life pic. It's upsetting, of course, but I pulled my hair back, slathered on the medicated lotion, and smiled at myself in the mirror. I might be a little hideous for the next 5 to 7 days, but I'm fighting skin cancer again. And just like the last time, I'm going to win. :)

Way back in 2017 I made a crazy quilt bag and added to it this lizard bling brooch that I used to wear when I was young and crazy. I ended up giving away the bag as a work sample, but I ended up regretting it because I loved that brooch. Ever since then I've been looking for another. Since it was mass-produced, inexpensive costume jewelry (I couldn't afford anything else when I was a youngster) I thought I'd have a slim shot at finding it or something very similar, so for five years I've been doing random searches for lizard brooches and looking. Guess what. I found the exact same brooch. It's the same. Really. Even the little eyes are black glass, just like the original. Not giving away this one!

This is what I took to the dermatologist for my skin treatment, which was supposed to last two hours but only went an hour and a half because I didn't ask for a break. I had my face cleaned with acetone (very smelly) and then covered with medicine (ditto) and sat in the waiting room for an hour. While waiting I ate the breakfast muffins I brought with me and drank some juice, read the beginning of one of Tilly Rose's stitch books, and did some work for the day job on my smart keypad. The nurse then came to take me to have the light treatment. That was sitting with my eyes closed for thirty minutes while a wrap-around light device did the work. It was mildly uncomfortable -- like how you feel after staying outdoors a little too long without sunscreen -- but no big deal. Once she saw I wasn't going to be fussy the nurse went to deal with another patient undergoing the same treatment (apparently she was very fussy about hers.) Once I was finished she also praised me ...

I mainly use old broochs as embellishments for my quilted bags. One of the floral pins in the vintage lot that just arrived works perfectly as a focal piece on my scrap strip bag. The nicest part of using old brooches is that you only have to pin them in place, and they can also easily be removed. I have been looking for a star brooch to top a quilted Christmas tree of mine for a while now. The vintage Avon brooch is a perfect match. I spent a long time making this piece, which has holographic thread hand-quilting and hundreds of little faux pearls on it. Topping it with a lovely shimmering star made me very happy. :)

When I saw this lot of 26 vintage brooches go up for auction I decided to bid on it (sticking to a sensible max bid), and to my surprise I won the lot for $30.12. That's about $1.15 per brooch. Here's the main reason I bid on this lot: I recognized this 2002 Avon Shimmering Star brooch, which is silverplated and in near-mint condition. For this one piece you'd usually have to pay $30 to $50. I was also intrigued by this tribal art brooch, which according to research was designed by Alice Warder Seely in 2000; it's made of pewter and worth about $25.00. A few more of the other brooches are stamped, and two are hand-signed, which is always a desirable plus in vintage jewelry. But most, like this pretty piece, are anonymous, mass-produced baubles. I love them all. Stop in tomorrow and I'll show you how I'm going to use them. :)

Now that summer is coming to an end -- far too quickly for me -- I'm thinking about what projects I'll tackle during the fall. I expect my unfinished linen quilt will take at least three or four more months to complete, but I'm not on a deadline with this project, so no pressure there. I'd like to make a lap quilt out of these sea glass-themed Art Gallery Fabric solids. This will be a gift quilt, so there is a deadline on this one. The next bag I make will be beach themed, with these fabrics and trims. At this point about half of my planned summer projects remain unfinished as well, so I want to add at least one or two of them to my fall endeavors. I likely won't be making any quilts as gifts for the holidays this year, so that takes some of the pressure off me.

My last batch of blood tests came in, and my blood sugar and cholesterol numbers have improved. In a few days I go in to have the precancerous spots on my face removed. The really good news is that the plaque blockages in my carotid arteries have reduced from 40-50% to 20-30%, which I'll attribute to lowering my cholesterol and sticking to the strict diet. I've been trying to see my health as a self-improvement project, even though I know at this stage of the game it's more like being on the Titanic. I never asked to be a passenger on this tub, but I am anyway. I know where I'm headed, and I can't get off the boat unless I want to reach my final destination earlier than the universe planned. This enormous, beautiful, horrible boat of my life, which has carried me along for all these years, will hit some random iceberg and sink. I can't escape it, avoid it, or bargain my way out of it. I can't fix the boat and keep it from happening. No one can...

I've always wanted to make one of those pretty velvet pumpkins, but I'm not keen on improvising one of my own. So I invested in a kit to make a small one. Viscose thread is beautiful, but also very tricky to stitch with, so I bought a palette of Edmar threads in gorgeous shades of green for some stitch practice. I've been dodging posting pics of the summer art quilt because it's still pretty chaotic. But here's where I am with that, and I have another week or so of stitching before I can even start on the beading and embellishments.

Making the first fabric journal taught me that if I want a lot of pages I need to rethink the cover and binding. Then I thought of an index card journal I once made, and decided not to cover or bind the pages at all. I cut as many cutter quilt scraps as I could to fit inside the box, which was eighteen. The stack of pages. Everything fits beautifully inside the box, which now serves as the cover as well as the container. :)

For my first fabric journal I wanted to use cutter quilt scraps for the pages, so I cut a bunch of those to fit inside the cover I made. I then stitched the pages and the cover together in layers to see if that would work as a binding method. It worked, but due to the bulk I couldn't put as much as I'd wanted in the journal, and ended up with eight pages. My goal with using these fabric journals is to stitch on the pages, or mount small art textiles on them (probably both.) I even manage to christen the inside of the back cover with a splotch of dribbled tea. Oh, well -- it's the personal touch, right? The journal fits nicely into the box, with room to spare if I want to add more textile art or emphemera in the future.

For something different the other night I tried this Cajun Chicken Club Sandwich recipe , which was delicious. My tweaks were using onion rolls and cutting the recipe in half for two sandwiches (I also used only three strips of bacon.) My guy and I really liked it a lot. Image Credit: Cajuncookingrecipes.com

The first fabric journal I'm making is for the red upcycled box with the primitive/tribal print embellishments. The fabric I used for the box came in a hand-dyed bundle from one of my favorite textile recycling sellers, and I've been saving it for a special project. The bold print has unusual colors, and although I rarely match things I decided to use the same fabric for my journal cover. Recycling is the basic theme of this project, so with the print I paired some cotton batting I harvested from a quilt end that came in my scraps box, and a piece of plain white scrap broadcloth for the inside cover. The interior of the box is 7" X 8", so I made the cover 13" X 15", which will give me a journal that is 6-1/2" X 7-1/2". Right now I'm quilting and beading the journal cover, and once that's done I'll sew in the pages.

I've made many of my own journals over the years, often from recycled materials like this old book. Even with purchased journals I like to try different techniques and themes. Some that I make every year are pocket journals, which I put together from the pages of the previous year's old wall calendars. I also add many mini quilts and textile art pieces to the pages of those I make and purchase, but I've never made a journal entirely out of fabric (and now it seems odd to me that I haven't.) For instructions I've looked around online, but the blog posts and videos I've found on fabric journal making are more mixed-media. You can take an online class in making fabric journals, too, but they're a bit pricey. I think from this point I'll simply improvise and make two fabric journals according to what I want to do. I'm sure my experience with the paper type will help.